The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [101]
He held my hand and led me up the heavily carpeted stairs. Thump, my father’s body falling. My mother cradling his skull as I walked in. The blood everywhere.
I had passed by Hamish’s room countless times on the way to the upstairs bathroom when I was visiting. Once, when the children were in high school, Natalie had brought me inside and implored me to inhale deeply.
“This is the funkiest room in the house,” she said. “I can’t get rid of it, and he never opens a window.”
“Hormones,” I’d said.
She smiled. “It’s like living with a bomb about to go off.”
But the scent of teenage lust had been replaced with a whirring air filter in the corner of the room, and the bed was no longer a twin.
“You bring girls here?” I asked.
“Some girls,” he said, and put his hand at the base of my skull. We kissed.
“I just want to make you feel better, Helen,” he said. “I’m not expecting anything.”
I remembered what Jake had said once, after Emily was born and I could not relax. Let yourself fall in.
We leaned back on the bed, and I shut my eyes. I had made my living striking poses at the instruction of others. Whenever it was hard, I would think of the smudged charcoal drawings in the basements and storage spaces of former Westmore students across the nation and of the few artists who had done something more than this.
In the Philadelphia Museum of Art, there was a painting by Julia Fusk. She had hired me to do a series of sittings for her when I was thirty-three. The painting that resulted was of a dynamic torso that bled off the page. It was only because I’d modeled for it that I saw where Fusk had taken certain liberties—made me more muscular, less lean.
As Hamish made love to me, I thought of Fusk’s painting. Eventually the girls would find it again. Jake would lead them to it or Sarah would remember me taking the two of them to see it. She had stared at the blues and greens and oranges that waved across my thighs and lower stomach. Emily had excused herself and gone to the gift shop.
Fusk’s work was my immortality. The fact that it was headless had never bothered me.
Hamish stopped suddenly.
“You’ve got to give me something, Helen.”
I reached for his penis, hoping this time for the ejaculation that I could wipe off of my stomach and pretend was disappointing.
After his initial pleasure, he stilled my hand.
“I’m more than my dick,” he said. “Touch me.”
I could feel how small and desperate my eyes had grown. “Don’t ask too much of me, Hamish. I can’t give too much right now.”
“You’re doing this for the car.”
I did not contradict him.
Something changed then. He parted my legs farther than was truly comfortable. He worked at me roughly, as if I were one of the action figures that had littered his floor as a child.
I tried to help him along. I pulled my own string and spoke to him in phrases I’d heard myself say in the midst of actual passion dozens of times. I stared at the small tattooed dragon below his collarbone and mimicked my former self for him.
Finally, just as the muscles on the insides of my thighs felt strained beyond recovery, the joints in my hips the dry ball bearings of a woman my mother’s age, he came.
He shuddered and fell on top of me with all his weight. My breath went out of me, and for a brief second I thought of the prostitute in Arthur Shawcross’s car, how she had spent the next three days doing speedballs.
I pushed at Hamish’s chest.
“Car,” I said.
“You’re a good fuck too,” he said bitterly.
As he zipped up his pants—chinos, I noted, instead of his usual jeans—I thought how I could ruin anything.
“Give me a few minutes to check everything out,” he said.
I lay undressed on his bed and listened to him take the stairs down to the first floor, walk through the family room, and go out the garage door.
I did not move until the air filter cycled on, making a light breeze cross my body. I turned on my side and propelled myself up with my left arm. I sat on the corner of Hamish’s bed and began to clothe myself. I was staring